THE SUPREME reins of government over the "people's democratic" Czechoslovakia are in the hands of the KSŽ. However, by longstanding communist precept, the Party is not supposed to act as its
own administrator in the affairs of State. "The functions of the Party
collectives must on no account be confused with the functions of
the state organs," cautions a resolution adopted at the Eighth
Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1919. "Such confusion
would produce fatal results. . . . The Party must carry out its decisions through the soviet organs. . . . The Party should endeavor
to guide the activities of the soviets, not to supplant them."1 The
need of a "precise demarcation" between the work of the Party and
the state organs was emphasized at other Party congresses.2

These Soviet pronouncements laid a firm ideological foundation
for the dichotomy of a real and a formal government that is characteristic of the countries subjected to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Party is the exclusive policy-maker on all governmental
levels and thus the country's real government. "In our state mechanism we apply the Leninist principle that political decisions of the
ruling Communist Party, made by its leading organs, are binding
in the political sense for the whole state," stresses a Czechoslovak
government textbook.3 But the actual execution of the Party's policies is entrusted to the agencies of formal government operating
under the all-pervasive Party controls. "It is the substance of the
Party leadership of the state apparatus that the Party determines the

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